#NewBook Migration and the Search for Home

Migration and the Search for Home

Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives

Authors: Boccagni, Paolo

Home is usually perceived as what placidly lies in the background of everyday life. Migrants’ experience tells a different story. What happens to home, once someone moves far away from its “natural” bases and searches for new ones under often marginalized living conditions? And what does transnational migration say of the changing views, feelings and practices of home, even among “sedentary” people? How (if at all) a sense of home relies on a dwelling place, on an intimate relationship, on memories of the past or on aspirations for the future – and what difference this makes in practice – are the questions underlying the migration-home nexus as an emerging research field. From an apparently intimate and domestic concern, home, or the search for it, turns into a major public question. It raises claims, conflicts and dilemmas which should not go unnoticed. An original map of migrants’ ways of homing, over space and time, is then necessary.